Misery Mining

What these figures mean for Misery Mining

Start with the base game, because this is one of the few Nolimit City releases where it is not the problem. Misery Mining returns 61.07% from ordinary spins, second among the studio's nine titles here only to Fire in the Hole xBomb at 63.51%. Both are a different proposition from Punk Rocker's 42.84%, where the base game is a tollbooth rather than a game.

What that buys is time without the usual punishment. The hit frequency is 28.57%, so getting on for three spins in ten return something, and when they do you are playing a machine that gives back over 61p in the pound outside the feature. Set against Tombstone R.I.P. — 9.08% hit rate, 55.99% base — this is a far more habitable game to sit in while waiting for the round that matters.

Then look at what it is waiting for, and the arithmetic turns harsh again. The bonus arrives once in 220 spins and carries 35.02 points of the 96.09% return. The ceiling is 70,000x, the largest in this studio's range here apart from Tombstone R.I.P.'s 300,000x. And the odds on that ceiling are once in 60,000,000 spins: at six seconds a spin, roughly eleven and a half years of uninterrupted play. The 70,000x is not a prize, it is a property of the mathematics.

The figure that actually governs a session is the one for a 100x win, and here it is poor: once in 1,251 spins. Only Punk Rocker, at 1,789, makes you wait longer among this studio's games. Compare Das xBoot at 635 — the same studio, a comparable ceiling at 55,200x, and twice the frequency of a win worth noticing. That is the trade this game makes and it is unusual: a kinder base game and a bigger top prize, paid for in the middle of the distribution. You will lose your money more slowly here and go longer between the moments that make a session memorable.

It is worth doing the arithmetic on a thousand spins, because the three published figures fit together into something concrete. At £1 a spin, 1,000 spins will on average produce about 286 paying spins, roughly four or five bonus rounds, and — on the 1,251-spin figure — not even one win of 100x. The money comes back as 286 mostly-small returns and a handful of features, and the thing most players are actually playing for arrives somewhere in the second thousand spins, if at all. That is not an argument against the game; it is what a 96.09% return looks like when 35 points of it are behind a round that comes every 220 spins and the big wins are rationed at one in 1,251.

The volatility index of 19.08 sits almost exactly level with Fire in the Hole xBomb's 19.22, and both are roughly double the 9.9 that is the highest figure NetEnt publishes for any game on this site. Within its own studio, though, 19.08 is mid-range: Tombstone R.I.P. is at 66.85, Karen Maneater 36.42, Mental 29.93, Dead Canary 26.88. This is not the extreme end of Nolimit City's catalogue, whatever the 70,000x implies.

A note on what a feature buy does to all of the above. This game sells one, like every Nolimit City title here, and buying it converts a 220-spin average wait into an immediate bonus round. The structural case is weaker here than in most of the studio's games precisely because the base game is good by its standards — at 61.07% you are not escaping anything terrible. The price is set in the game client and we have not read it at any operator, so whether the buy is fairly priced is not a question this page can settle.

The summary: among the most extreme games on this site, this is the one that treats you best while you wait and worst when you are waiting for something specific. Second-best base return in its studio, second-largest ceiling, and the second-longest wait for a 100x. If you want the structure of a Nolimit City game without its usual hostility in the base, this is the title; if you want a meaningful win inside a thousand spins, Das xBoot does the same job twice as quickly.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures Nolimit City states for Misery Mining itself — not our estimates.

How Misery Mining compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures. Nolimit City lists this title as certified for UKGC.